President Trump’s attention to international affairs and foreign policy has been focused on “America First;” canceling the scheduled meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was no exception. Trump referenced Kim’s “tremendous anger and open hostility” and described the summit’s cancellation as a “missed opportunity” and “a truly sad moment in history.”
Trump has been consistently firm that the meeting will be about America’s interests in denuclearization. As a negotiation tactic, Trump’s letter showing America’s willingness to walk away until North Korea is willing to work with America to achieve lasting peace and align our interests is responsible advocacy and brilliantly done.
As America contemplates our position in a global context and most of us are rightly praising Trump for his international dealings, it’s a good time to remind ourselves why we still have a sovereign right to bargain for exchanges with other nations and represent ourselves unilaterally in our own best interests. The “America First” ethos has been criticized as egocentric, populist, and nationalist, but America has always intentionally chosen to be a self-determined government.
America is premised on the unique idea that government exists to protect and preserve the unalienable rights innately and pre-politically granted by our “Creator” to every individual, rather than the government existing to make decisions on behalf of the individual and determine our best interests collectively.
Michael Donnelly, senior legal counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association’s Global Outreach, describes the current global positioning of democracy and sovereignty versus the concept of international “human rights” as mutually exclusive interests. Almost imperceptibly, culture has adopted the term “human rights” as a synonym for individual unalienable rights, but the United Nations and the burgeoning global governance movement recognizes a drastically different definition.
Because the United Nations specifically (along with other global entities and nations who agree with the U.N.) understands human rights to be “universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated,” Donnelly asserts that the claim of universality is fundamentally in conflict with national sovereignty, “usually understood to mean that a sovereign people through a democratic-majority-rule system of governance decide the rules of law by which they will govern and live.”
The tension is immediately perceivable between a required recognition of universality of “human rights” and the sovereign right of a nation to self-determine. This also isn’t just an interesting philosophical problem; it’s one that we can observe, once we recognize it, at the crux of international policy problems.
One example is the immigration debate. Liberals will assert that humanitarianism and the universality of human rights requires an open border because every individual, regardless of their country of origin and citizenship, has the basic right to live wherever they choose. This idea is naturally in conflict with democratic sovereignty and our representative republic that is delegated the legitimate constitutional power to self-determine who (if any) people of a foreign nation we may want to admit entry and under what circumstances and for what length of term.
In other words, if you believe in the universality of human rights, you concede that sovereign nations exist subordinate to any particular individual’s claim of right. America is not thusly founded upon the premise of the universality of human rights, but rather justly recognizes that nations’ governments may validly and legitimately operate to protect their own citizens and serve their best interests. Roger Scruton wrote an excellent essay for the Wall Street Journal defending a case for nations.
This is not to say that America’s and other nations’ interests may at some points be aligned — like the proposed meeting with North Korea — but a national government must first concern itself with its own citizen’s interests. This fundamental philosophical distinction between human rights and individual unalienable rights lies at the heart of why Trump’s tagline of “America First” actually makes sense and is quite correct. Our government is supposed to be our advocate and rightly represents American interests first.
Not conceding unilateral advocacy is foundational to our sovereign attribute of self-determination, a right recognized in international law as jus cogens and listed in the beginning of the U.N. Charter. Ironically, one of the most dangerous threats to our sovereign advocacy currently is the United Nations’ body of treaties and the continued requests for the U.S. to become a signatory.
But if the U.S. signs on to a United Nations treaty or convention that requires giving over a measure of governance to a global arbiter, we will have incorporated that treaty into our supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, thus giving up protection of our individual rights.
We absolutely should not concede any measure of our sovereignty to the United Nations or global governance. We have enough problems within our own domestic scope of judicial review and our Supreme Court’s activism, and to give over any measure of judicial review authority to an international court unconcerned with American constitutional law and our national sovereignty over universality of “human rights” would be a disaster.
President Trump has displayed an amazing awareness of why “America First” matters. This isn’t a trivial, egocentric concept. Americans are best served by a president and government that recognizes the legitimate authority of the U.S. to maintain its status as an independent, free world leader.
Jenna Ellis (@jennaellisJDFI) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is director of Public Policy at the James Dobson Family Institute. She is a constitutional law attorney, radio host, and the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
